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Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.

Alexander Smith

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Alexander Smith
Age: 36 †
Born: 1830
Born: December 31
Died: 1867
Died: January 5
Poet
Cille Mheàrnaig
Graves
Reputation
Fame
Inscription
Glory
Inscriptions
Coffin
Coffins
Melancholy
Grave

More quotes by Alexander Smith

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Fine phrases I value more than bank-notes. I have ear for no other harmony than the harmony of words. To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.
Alexander Smith
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In my garden I spend my days in my library I spend my nights.
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Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.
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Everything is sweetened by risk.
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The great man is the man who does a thing for the first time.
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If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.
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In my garden I spend my days, in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present with the book I am in the past.
Alexander Smith
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The dead keep their secrets, and in a while we shall be as wise as they - and as taciturn.
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Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
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Pleasure has no logic it never treads in its own footsteps.
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A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.
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In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October.
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There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.
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A man does not plant a tree for himself he plants it for posterity.
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The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.
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A thought may be very commendable as a thought, but I value it chiefly as a window through which I can obtain insight on the thinker.
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Pride's chickens have bonny feathers, but they are an expensive brood to rear. They eat up everything, and are always lean when brought to market.
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The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.
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It is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some single irradiating word.
Alexander Smith
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Yet through all, we know this tangled skein is in the hands of One, Who sees the end from the beginning: He shall unravel all.
Alexander Smith